That year,
1990, both Edler and his sister Pat died near the
same time and the Wyche family decided

to have a double funeral.
Both were buried side by side in Jerusalem cemetery. Their
sister Ruth,

I believe, was responsible for the funeral
preparations. I was not invited to participate in

the mourning
line. In the funeral notice, they proclaimed Edler died without
issue.

Letters of an Abiding Faith

Legacy of a Slave's GrandDaughter to
her Son

written by Ella Lewis to her Son
(Rudolph Lewis)

* * * * *

Letter

23

September 30, 1983

Dear Son,

Just a line to give answer to your letter. I
was Very glade to hear from you and Know you was doing OK So
Far. It getting cold down here. But it Been So hot. It feel good
to me.

Well Von Carter has gone back to work.* He So
happy. I glade For him. I went to Richmond to the Fair Monday.
It was a nice trip. But my Feet got So tired walking. A cup of
soda was $1.00, a scoop ice cream 75 cents. I did not play no
games. I love the poems you wrote in your letter. I will always
keep it.

No I wont Ever leave you. Even in case I go
first I still wont leave you For my love will always Be in your
heart. But darling lets not talk about it. Just take it one day
at a time. I pray For you and my self So the Lord will do the
rest. I all ways Be here For you. I just pray that the Lord will
keep you and Bless you until you reach your goal.

I trust you can Find a place where is cheaper.
Because that a lot of money. So rite and let me Know how you
made out. I do hope you can come for Xmas. Did you ever get in
touch with Davie. I saw Peter last week. He OK he going to
School.

Here is Some more death. Susie May Parham
Buried her last Monday.** People is really going away. Talking
about Millard Stith he Been Sick a long time. He wouldn't tell
it But any Body know him Could tell it. Have you heard From
Lucinda yet. I rite more when I hear From you. Love all ways
Mother. I love you.

Doc I diden under stand that you ask me of
your life When you was a Baby. Well I try to Explain. Lucinda
went to Richmond to work. She stayed with your Uncle Richard and
his girl Friend at that time. She got dissatisfied at staying
there so I sent her to Baltimore.

She diden tell me she was pregnant. So I found
out she was. I and your daddy ask her to give us the baby. She
say that Etler Wyche was your father. I don't know. But I do
Know Clarence is not your daddy.*** I do know.

As it was she couldn't work and pay a Baby
Sitter. Altho I dont think she want to give you up. After all
she wasn't getting much money. I know Etler told me he would
have married her if she had told him She was pregnant. But she
Say she diden want him to know it. So that why I Come in it. I
dont regret I did my Best.****

As you Know she diden stay with William Lee 12
months.***** She left him Tine was 9 months old. She was
pregnant with Debbie. I had to pay her hospital Bill my self
When Debbie was born in Richmond hospital. But now you is a
grown man. She know you wish to under stand. I guess she hate to
tell you so that about all I know.

Love Mother

* * * * *

Commentary

*Clarence Von Carter is Susie’s
middle son.

**Susie May Parham was a neighbor and very elderly when she
died. Men in Jarratt die early, so the town was becoming a town
of widows. With the state prison moving to Jarratt, this pattern
has been curtailed. Many young people have moved up from
Carolina for jobs at the prison. A modern apartment building was
constructed in Jarratt to accommodate this new influx of
residents. This is a great change from the sixties for most
people were not then hooked to a water or sewage line. There are
also a great number of Hispanics moving into the region which
will be the source of future misunderstandings and conflicts.
For if people don’t know your parents they don’t know you. I
suspect that in twenty years land values will begin to
skyrocket. The swamp land that was once reserved for Negroes
will be attractive to a greater number of whites and Hispanics.

*** Clarence C.L. Carter was the husband of Susie Lewis, one
of Mama’s daughters. In 1956, he died from bullet wounds as a
result of a gunfight with local cops in a nearby town, Emporia.
He killed one cop, wounded the other. He was my childhood hero.
Spiritually, I felt I had more in common with him than I had
with Edler. With his dreamy eyes and curvaceous lips, I thought
Clarence was beautiful and noble, willing to die in defense of
honor and integrity. That was the sort of man I wanted to be
related to. At times, I even felt that I loved him more than his
own sons. The oldest of his sons, Norman, was eight at his death
and so was I.

****Though in my thirties, at the writing of this letter, I
was still having doubts about who was my biological father.
Edler ("Etler") Wyche was said to be my father. We got
to know each other in the late sixties and early seventies. No
one thought I looked like him and his family did not really
accept me as a Wyche.

Edler spent most of his adult life in Baltimore working at
Sparrows Point. As a result of a skin infection from the
asbestos, he was forced into retirement. With his pension, he
moved back to Jarratt and lived with his mother Cary Wyche. They
found him dead in his truck which was sitting astride the
railroad tracks. I visited him several times while he lived with
his mother and I went to his funeral, though I felt a bit
apprehensive about doing that, for none of the Wyches had
contacted me. I had heard about the death through my mother
Lucinda. I suppose Ruth, Edler’s sister had called Lucinda. Or
maybe Mama called me and told me about his death.

Even with such apprehensions, I left Baltimore for Jarratt.
That year, 1990, both Edler and his sister Pat died near the
same time and the Wyche family decided to have a double funeral.
Both were buried side by side in Jerusalem cemetery. Their
sister Ruth, I believe, was responsible for the funeral
preparations. I was not invited to participate in the mourning
line. In the funeral notice, they proclaimed Edler died without
issue. That silence, however, may have been done for legal
reasons so as to curtail claims on his property.

When my mother Lucinda questioned Ruth, Edler’s oldest
sister, about the absence of my name in the funeral notice, she
told Lucinda that she had forgotten about me. How that was
possible I do not have the faintest, for I stayed at her house
during the late 1960s and I was at her mother’s wake only a
few years before. But that is a matter the Wyches have to live
with to their shame. Edler, called "Whitey" by his
friends, was a good man, as men go who have no spiritual life. I
was very fond of him and when I lived with him I found him
amusing. But he was too tied to the material and he cared too
much what others thought of him. He retired as a country
gentleman, drinking and hunting deer.

*****William Lee Carter was Clarence’s brother and Lucinda’s
first husband. That is, Susie and Lucinda, two of Mama's five
daughters, married two brothers. William Lee was in the
car and present at the gunfight in Emporia in which his brother
Clarence was killed.. William Lee is the father of Celestine and
Deborah, the older two of Lucinda’s daughters. Both of them
were raised in Baltimore, mostly in Cherry Hill but also in
Edmondson Village. They both went to and graduated from
Edmondson High. Lucinda’s other two daughters have a different
father. Thus Celestine and Deborah are cousins to Norman, Von,
and Mack through bother their mother and their father. Their
sister Theresa became familiar with her father only after she
had married twice and had her own son, Maurice. Her father is a
member of the Stith family of Jarratt. Theresa cared little
whether the Stiths accepted her or not. In such situations,
acceptance of estranged members of families in rural areas are
always difficult; for it is more than blood, it is the sharing
of a history of sentiments, of a tradition.

On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—

According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.

Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.

As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.